Data Storage Companies Quarterly Earnings

IBM 4Q 2021 Earnings

January 24, 2022

Infrastructure (includes Hybrid Infrastructure, Infrastructure Support)— revenues of $4.4 billion, down 0.2 percent, up 1.7 percent at constant currency (including about 5 points from incremental external sales to Kyndryl):

- Hybrid Infrastructure flat, up 2 percent at constant currency (including about 4 points from incremental external sales to Kyndryl)

-- IBM Z down 6 percent, down 4 percent at constant currency

-- Distributed Infrastructure up 5 percent, up 7 percent at constant currency

- Infrastructure Support down 1 percent, up 1 percent at constant currency (including about 6 points from incremental external sales to Kyndryl)

- Infrastructure segment hybrid cloud revenue down 12 percent, down 11 percent at constant currency

Arvind Krishna:

Our platform-centric model has attractive economics. For every dollar of hybrid platform revenue, IBM and our ecosystem partners can generate three to five dollars of software, six to eight dollars of services, and one to two dollars of infrastructure revenue. This drives IBM's hybrid cloud revenue, which is up 19 percent for the year.

Hybrid Infrastructure and Infrastructure Support revenue were up two percent and one percent respectively, with pretty consistent contribution from the new Kyndryl relationship.

Hybrid Infrastructure includes IBM Z and Distributed Infrastructure. In Distributed Infrastructure, revenue was up seven percent driven by pervasive strength across our storage portfolio. Looking at Infrastructure profit, the pre-tax margin was up over nine points, but essentially flat normalizing for last year's structural action.

Dell Technologies Q4 FY22 Results

Feb 24, 2022

Infrastructure Solutions Group revenue for the fourth quarter was $9.2 billion, up 3% year-over-year. Storage revenue was $4.5 billion, while servers and networking revenue was $4.7 billion – up 7% year-over-year. Operating income was $1.1 billion or approximately 12% of Infrastructure Solutions Group revenue. For the full year, revenue was $34.4 billion, with operating income of $3.7 billion.

Key areas of innovation:

• Announced expansions to our APEX multi-cloud capabilities, enabling customers to move from multi-cloud by default to multi-cloud by design, as well as connect to multiple clouds without hyperscale lock-in.

• Introduced Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS (Amazon Web Services), giving organizations modern data protection to isolate critical data from a ransomware attack and accelerate data recovery

Jeffrey W. Clarke:

FY '22 was a historic year for Dell Technologies. In fact, the best in our company's history. We reached more than $100 billion in revenue and grew 17%, a huge achievement for a company of our scale and ahead of our long-term value creation growth rates.

Chuck Whitten:

Specifically, FY '22 storage orders grew at the fastest rate since the EMC acquisition, and all geographies grew storage for the year. Midrange storage orders were up double digits in FY '22, and PowerStore remains the fastest-ramping storage product in our company's history. And demand for our leading server products accelerated over the course of the year, culminating with record server demand in Q4.

Our leading storage portfolio, where we're #1 in high-end, midrange, entry, unstructured, object, all-flash, HCI and data protection, enabled us to capture growth across a variety of storage architectures and customer sizes. For example, we saw double-digit demand growth in the high end, driven by select enterprise customers, 25% demand growth for our unstructured storage solutions and 8% growth for HCI despite a tough year-over-year comparison.

Within midrange, PowerStore demand continued to ramp in Q4, up 34% sequentially and now approximately 50% of our midrange SAN mix. Encouragingly, 26% of PowerStore buyers are new to Dell storage, and 29% were repeat buyers, important leading indicators of future growth. Servers and networking revenue was up for a fifth consecutive quarter, up 7%.

Storage revenue was roughly flat year-over-year due to the aforementioned backlog build and storage software and services content that gets deferred and amortized over time. ISG operating income was $1.1 billion, down 7% due primarily to backlog growth, component inflation and logistics costs. We continue to take pricing actions to mitigate cost increases, though component shortages and turbulent logistics markets remain risks that we are actively managing.

In summary, FY '22 was a solid year for ISG as infrastructure markets rebounded, the business returned to growth, our leading indicators of server and storage demand were ahead of revenue, and our integrated business model continues to deliver despite challenging supply dynamics. ISG is poised for a strong FY '23, given the momentum in the business. Tom will share thoughts on forward guidance in a moment.

NetApp Q3 FY22 Results

Feb 23, 2022

George Kurian:

In Q3, our focused execution delivered double-digit revenue growth led by the impressive performance of our Public Cloud services and all-flash array businesses; record high gross margin dollars, operating income and earnings per share.

All-flash array penetration of our installed base ticked up another point to 31% of installed base systems, giving us substantial headroom to continue to help existing and new customers modernize their storage environments with cloud-connected flash arrays. We further enhanced our position with the introduction of the AFF A900, which delivers unified support for file, block, and object protocols, built-in data protection with cutting-edge anti-ransomware capabilities, and the high performance and resiliency required to support the most critical business workloads.

In summary, our strong Q3 results underscore our unique position in solving organization's most significant challenges in both cloud-native and traditional applications, on-premises and in hybrid multi-cloud environments.

First, we help customers simplify and modernize existing data centers and deploy traditional applications quickly and confidently. Second, we help customers adopt modern application architectures like Kubernetes and microservices for new workloads and deploy data-rich applications like machine and deep learning.  And third, we help customers optimize cost, performance, availability and security for applications and associated infrastructure across multiple clouds.

Nutanix Q2 FY2022 Earnings

March 2, 2022

Rajiv Ramaswami:

I think the demand environment continues to be still healthy. We are seeing customers continue to focus on using IT as an enabler. They are focused on continuing to modernize their infrastructure, go to the public cloud and of course, continuing to drive their remote workforce. So we haven't seen that – their fundamental dynamics are still pretty much intact. In that context, what I would say is that we are a pure-play provider focused on that HCI market and transitioning legacy 3-tier storage architectures to HCI, right, and then extending that to the public cloud. So we haven't seen anything significant from a demand change at all and customers continue to be investing at this point.

First on the competitive environment and then the partners. So, we haven't seen a major change in market dynamics from a competitive perspective. I will say, fundamentally from the market view HCI continued to grow with basic traditional architectures, while it becomes a foundation for hybrid multi-cloud. And like I said earlier, it's capable of handling all these – all virtualized enterprise workloads, including same-size databases that are very performance-sensitive. Now, from a competitive angle, if you look at some of the other players without naming names here, so many of the other places in the market have offerings in both traditional storage and HCI. And so they tend to be not – they maybe be less aggressive in pushing HCI as they seek to protect margins in their traditional business. And then if you look at other classes of competitors, they had a broader portfolio that includes things like developers and security offerings without a focused go-to-market effort in just HCI. So, from that perspective, we are a pure play. We are continuing to win our fair share more of the market because of the platform, the robustness, the scale, the simplicity, the flexibility and freedom of choice that we offer and of course, our focus on customer delight. So, that's the competitive angle. Now, when it comes to the partners, again, I think we have talked about OEM partners and then our – and then the traditional vendors when we talked about our ecosystem and in the cloud. So, on the OEM side, we continue to grow the partnership with HPE. There – as you can see from their own earnings, they had a big focus on GreenLake. We are part of their GreenLake solutions, both our core platform as well as our database and service platform – era I am sorry, as part of their GreenLake offerings. GreenLake is small but growing rapidly. And the teams are working together in the field and continue to win deals together. So, that partnership continues to develop. Lenovo is a steady state with us. We have been working together with Lenovo for a long time. And then when we come to the ecosystem side of it. The two that we are very focused on right now Red Hat and Citrix. And with Red Hat we have had now, we are now two-plus quarters into – since we announced the partnership, we continue to do very well under the Red Hat fund side. There is a number of engagements. We continue to get new wins every quarter here. For example, this quarter, there were a couple of minutes that I can talk about like that continue to build on the momentum we had. One was around OpenShift running on top of the Nutanix platform. There was this a European energy services provider that to call their container-based big data workloads that were already running on OpenShift, but on a competing HCI solution and moved it to the Nutanix cloud platform, including our own hypervisor. We had another retailer customer who deployed their business-critical workloads on Red Hat Linux moving to the Nutanix cloud platform. So, that has relationship continues to grow. With Citrix, we have had a long-standing relationship that just got formalized recently. So, there is just a number of joint customer engagements and wins together around engine computing and virtual desktop. That happened every quarter. This quarter, that continues and that momentum in Citrix is very much there. The last piece was the cloud piece. There again, I think we have had our solution with AWS up for a while. We talked about some more examples of Win Stack this quarter in terms of customer usage. We are continuing to work jointly with Microsoft Azure to get our hybrid cloud solution out to market. We are in private preview on that. So, these partnerships are all continuing to build, and we expect to get more and more from them as we progress.

Pure Storage Q4 FY22 Earnings

03.02.2022

Charles Giancarlo:

I am very pleased to report that Pure delivered a fantastic Q4, capping off a great fiscal year. Our quarterly revenue grew 41% over last year's strong Q4. This past quarter we again enjoyed strong growth, especially in the Americas, our largest theater – and we grew across enterprise, commercial and public sectors. 

Full year revenue growth was 29%, and the annual growth of our subscription revenue was 37%. Revenue growth and operational leverage drove strong profit and cash flow growth in fiscal 22.

First, Pure's focus on developing Purity software and our Direct Flash technology to maximize the many advantages of solid state storage is unique in our industry and has taken many years to develop.Second, sustainable growth requires a broad portfolio that addresses a full range of customer needs - a portfolio that we have steadily developed over the last several years. Third, sustainable growth requires the ability to support customers in all major market segments - commercial, enterprise, public sector and cloud. 

Among our advantages are the simplicity in the design and use of our products, the ability to realize the best price performance from raw Flash, and the ability to perform non-disruptive upgrades for both hardware and software, which deliver a cloud-like experience. While some competitors make claims of non-disruptive upgrades in their marketing, they consistently fail to deliver.

We announced a record number of new products and services this past fiscal year including Purity upgrades for ransomware and disaster recovery; additions to our FlashArray//C series; FlashStack as a service; Pure Fusion; Portworx Data Services; and major enhancements to our Pure1 Digital Experience. This past December, we announced FlashArray//XL, which delivers 5.5PB of capacity in up to 80% less space and power than competitive all-flash solutions and is off to a great start. Our product pipeline for FY'23 is no less ambitious and I am incredibly excited about the year ahead.